Friday, 20 December 2019

This is an
experiment. You can judge how successful it is. I am trying it
because with this election there has been a lot of talk about a
revival in Blue Labour to recapture the Red Wall. The Conservatives
have been playing to socially conservative voters since at least
William (‘a foreign land’) Hague. So why has the strategy
succeeded so well in 2019 when it has had at best modest success
before now?

We can represent all
this in a simple diagram that is now widely used

The precise
positions of the party leaders could be the topic of endless
discussion, but for this post I just need them to be roughly right,
and for the directions of travel to be right. Blair was fairly
liberal but moderately left wing. The Tories since Thatcher have
always been pretty right wing in economic terms, and where we have
seen movement has been mainly on how socially conservative they are.

If people are
uniformly distributed around this map, then the centre is the place
to be in a two party, FPTP system. Parties do not go there because
their ideology/principles, maintained mainly by their members, stops
them.

Blair won because in
economic terms he was closer to the economic centre ground than the
Tories. After 18 years of Tory rule voters wanted better public
services. Yet after the Thatcher revolution in the Conservative party
the Tories were stuck with taking a right wing stance, so they tried
to shift the debate on to social issues where either side was some
way from the centre. A focus on immigration was a way of doing that,
with the added advantage of being perceived to be pro-worker and
pro-public services (the lie that immigration significantly reduced
wages and put pressure on public services).

This move had some
effect, reducing Labour’s vote. Yet under good economic times (and
economic times were good under Labour for ten years) the immigration
issue was not enough to defeat Blair. Public services were getting
better. As Theresa May put it, the Tories were still known as the
nasty party. This is why Cameron tried to portray himself as a
liberal conservative. In opposition he tried to move closer to the
centre in both economic terms (accepting Labour’s levels of
government spending) and social terms.

But everything
changed after the Global Financial Crisis. Regrettably, social
conservatism has more appeal when times are bad, at least in part
because the (incorrect) real wage/public service argument gains
traction. Yet at first sight that should have been counteracted by
Osborne moving sharply right with anti-Keynesian austerity (spending
cuts in a recession). So although Cameron had tried to move nearer
the centre on social issues, in economic terms by 2010 he moved
further away.

Here is where we
have to make an important modification to this apparatus. In a
country where one party has a media that is very sympathetic to the
right, it can change how its policies are perceived. Cameron dressed
austerity in socially conservative terms (the government is like a
household). For various reasons that I and others have documented at
length, a policy that was sharply contrary to basic economic theory
was adopted by most of the media as a necessity, and the media
therefore turned it into a sign of good government.

So austerity was not
perceived by most people as a right wing shrinking of the state at
great social cost (higher unemployment and lower real wages), but as
a neutral policy signifying economic competence. Once we allow for
this it is clear that for many Cameron was now closer to the centre
is perceived economic terms, and so became the government in 2010.

Austerity was so
successful that Labour eventually concluded they would have to accept
it to some extent. Miliband not only moved nearer the centre in
economic terms by accomodating austerity, he also did so by trying to
appear more hawkish on immigration (remember the mugs). But Labour do
not have a means of influencing perceptions, so their perceived
position was their actual position. In addition Miliband was tainted
with the perceived incompetence of the Labour government and was not
closer to the centre compared to Cameron’s perceived position, so
he lost.

Ed Miliband’s
defeat in 2015 was narrow but hard for Labour to take. Most of the
political commentators (as they always do) said Labour should move to
the right, and after the 2015 defeat they began to before the
leadership elections. Recall that parties find it hard to move to the
centre because their members will not allow it. That post 2015
rightward drift and the apparent acceptance of austerity was too much
for the membership, and they voted for Corbyn.

There are more than
two parties in the UK. So far we have been able to do the analysis
without mentioning them but now they become crucial. Cameron by
becoming more socially liberal allowed UKIP to gain votes. His
response was to offer a referendum on the EU. Brexit, particularly a
hard Brexit, should be an easy fail according to this diagram. It is
socially conservative and right wing: trade restrictions are created
so that labour and environmental regulations can be scrapped and not
to preserve workers jobs. Its true position is close to Johnson’s
in this diagram, while staying in the EU is a pretty centrist idea.

Brexit shows more
than anything how we have to think about perceptions. What made
Brexit a narrow winner when its true position suggested an easy loss?
In short a brilliant if totally dishonest campaign that painted it as
something it is not. Project Fear, with the help of the media,
completely nullified the right wing economic dimension of Brexit, and
turned it into a plus by talking about more money for the NHS.
Staying in the EU was successfully painted as ultra liberal (letting
the whole of Turkey come to the UK). As with austerity, the perceived
position of parties and policies is what matters when it comes to
winning elections and a referendum.

Now you could say
that by allowing perceptions I can put party’s positions wherever I
need to get the result I need. But just as we have good empirical
evidence that austerity was perceived as economically neutral by much
of the population, we also have good evidence that those who voted
for Brexit thought it would have no negative impact on the economy or
their personal incomes.

That Corbyn came
close to defeating May was not a surprise if you look at his position
on this diagram, once we recognise that what Corbyn managed to do in
2017 was neutralise Brexit as an issue. Because he remained as close
to the centre as May, he gained votes once his policies became clear
as a result of his manifesto. Without his portrayal in the right wing
press he might have won.

So what changed by
2019? He was not able to neutralise Brexit, because parliament had
agreed a deal. He had to choose, and whatever choice he made would
lose votes. For that (not
good) reason he delayed choosing, which allowed the resurgence of
the Liberal Democrats (and Greens) who portrayed themselves as the
true Remain party.

Yet Corbyn is still
closer to the centre than Johnson. He lost badly partly because
Brexit is perceived as neutral in economic terms by many, so
Johnson’s perceived economic position has become synonymous with
Brexit. However crucially he also lost because the UK is not a two
party system. The Liberal Democrats, the SNP and the Greens are all
perceived to be in liberal/left space, and together with Labour they
won more votes than Johnson and the Brexit party put together.

The lesson of all
this is twofold. First, this two-dimensional diagram can explain a
lot, once you replace the parties’ actual position against their
perceived position generated with a right wing media. Of course it
leaves out a lot (the popularity of leaders, which is related to
their charisma,
the effectiveness of campaigns etc), but it seems like a good place
to start. Second, as long as the Conservative party has the monopoly
of the right wing/socially conservative vote, left social liberals
cannot afford to split their vote among several parties. If Labour
ever made a significant move in a socially conservative position, as
Blue Labour wants, it would be defeated by yet more votes going to
the other left/liberal parties.
Postscript. For an excellent discussion of some of the points made here, see this post by Marios Richards

Friday, 13 December 2019

When I wrote this
in July I desperately wanted to be wrong. (Of course I was wrong
about a lot of the details but alas not the main point.) But it soon
became clear that, compared to 2017, the press had had two more years
to paint Corbyn as marxist, unpatriotic and racist, and for enough
people that would be a reason not to vote Labour. Among others who
supported Brexit, they really did believe that Johnson was the man to
get Brexit done.

Many will say that
Labour lost badly because they had a left wing manifesto. They always
do after each election defeat. I doubt that has much to do with this
defeat, although the large amount of giveaways to the wrong people was probably a factor. The problem was Corbyn, not Labour’s manifesto. And while
many voted against the media image of Corbyn more than anything else,
it has to be said that Corbyn’s past and his failures over the last
three years made the media’s job very easy.

We should of course
blame the media. The right wing press became part of the Tories
propaganda war. The Tories lied like never
before, just as some of them did in 2016. The BBC was
even more careful not to do anything that might upset the government,
and it has a real problem when ‘accidents’ keep advantaging one
side. But the moment the BBC played a key role in electing Boris
Johnson was very specific, and it goes back to the day Johnson got
his deal with the EU.

What the media
should have asked at that moment is why Johnson had accepted a deal
that was essentially the first the EU had proposed, but which he and
other ERG members had said at the time was unacceptable. Why had he
capitulated? Was it all just a ruse so he could become Prime
Minister?

Nobody thought a
deal was possible, gushed Laura Kuenssberg, repeating one of CCHQ’s
lines to take. No sense from her of what had actually happened. As I
noted here,
the BBC’s Brussels correspondent got it about right, but the tone
of the reporting was set by Kuenssberg. Whether this
misrepresentation of Johnson’s deal was deliberate or the result of
ignorance I don’t know, but it was critical.

Of course the Tory
and Brexit press also took CCHQ’s lines to take. The BBC is the
only chance most voters have to get a check on what their newspapers
say. It did not provide any such check on this occasion. And it is
critical because it allows Johnson to say, as he has, that it was his
unique abilities that helped him achieve a deal that everyone said
was impossible. No doubt he will say the same when he refuses an
extension in July next year because the EU have refused to give him
the deal he wants.

Voters who still
believe in leaving the EU were left with the impression, thanks to
the BBC (and of course the Brexit press), that Johnson was the person
who could deal with the EU and get Brexit done. They were not told
the truth that he was the person who had helped waste almost a year
in squabbling in part so he could get to be Prime Minister. So
Leavers are left with an image of competence rather than the reality,
which is that Johnson is quite prepared to damage the economy and the
workings of democracy just for his own personal gain.

But there is little
that Labour or the Liberal Democrats can do about media bias while
they are out of power. Undoubtedly a key reason Johnson won was
because the Remain/anti-Johnson vote was split. It is depressing and
very worrying how many people voted for Johnson, our own Donald
Trump, but while the Electoral College gifted Trump his victory
despite losing the popular vote, so First Past The Post (FPTP) gave
Johnson his victory. A lot of people voted tactically, but not
enough.

Both Labour and
Liberal Democrats are to blame for not cooperating. While Labour’s
failure was not a surprise, I had hoped the Liberal Democrats would
take the opportunity to seize the moral high ground and not put up
candidates in Labour marginals like Canterbury. It didn’t, and
instead it spent too much of its time attacking Labour in the futile
belief that this would win over some Tory voters. I suspect they
would have been much more successful if they had been honest that the
best way to stop Brexit was through a minority Labour government
dependent on LibDem votes.

The ultimate
responsibility for the split vote must nevertheless rest with Jeremy
Corbyn.

The big surge in the
Liberal Democrat vote from below 10% to over 20% at its peak began in
the Spring of this year, and it coincided with a collapse in Labour’s
vote. This quite remarkable change in fortunes cannot be put down to
a biased media, but is obviously a Brexit effect.

Throughout 2018
Labour had managed to stay the obvious choice for Remainers, as it
had been in the 2017 election. But as soon as May finalised her
Withdrawal Agreement it was clear triangulating would no longer work,
and Labour would have to take a position. The polls suggested Labour
would lose votes by not supporting Remain, but as I noted
in December last year too many within Labour were in denial.

Labour entering into
talks with May to get Brexit done was I suspect the final straw for
many Remainers. They didn’t go to the new and short lived Remain
party but the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. The European election
was a disaster, but shifting Labour’s policy seemed like trying to
get blood out of a stone. I really think if they had moved at the
beginning of 2019 to where they ended up things would have been
rather different. Instead the Labour leadership single-handedly
created the revival of the Liberal Democrats. That, as well as his
failure to deal with antisemitism and some of his intolerant
supporters, are major factors behind this defeat.
Easy to say in hindsight? Not really. I said these things in 2016 in the second Labour leadership election that Corbyn won. I said it throughout late 2018 and early 2019 was the Remain vote became disenchanted with Corbyn. But the behaviour of Labour MPs made an alternative to Corbyn impossible in 2016 then, as it had been in 2015, and after the 2017 general election result he was never going to be removed.

Could we have
stopped Johnson if Labour had not allowed the Remain vote to split.
To be honest I don’t know. That is how negative the media’s image
of Corbyn has been. Some Lexiters will say it is all Remainers’
fault, but that is a nonsense position. As a result of this defeat we
have reached the end of the line for the Remain cause. It has been
three years of experts and people who made themselves experts trying
to explain why Brexit was such a bad idea, but nothing we could do
was able to counteract the propaganda of the Brexit press and the
knowledge as opinion attitude of the broadcast media, and
particularly the BBC. The really striking finding after three years
when the truth about Brexit became crystal clear to anyone wanting or
able to see it is that the number of people wanting Brexit changed
only a little, and that is what gave Johnson his majority.

Now that we have
elected our own Donald Trump, I’m reminded of a talk Paul Krugman
gave after Trump won. At the time I wrote a post
about it, and I ended it like this:

“We can, and
should, continue to rage against the dying of the light. What is
difficult, in this time of crazy, is being able to put that rage
aside, and engage in a form of quietism, a retreat from the here and
now of political discourse. Not a retreat into any kind of acceptance
of where we now are, but instead into asking what and why, and from
the answers to those questions to planning for the time when facts
get back into fashion. But more than that. Using the answers to the
what and why to prevent us lapsing back into our current post-truth
world.”

I will continue to
rage, but not quite as often as I have done since the blog began
almost exactly eight years ago. It is time for deeper thought about
how we get back to the light and ensure that we never again lapse
into a post-truth world.

Tuesday, 10 December 2019

In this election we
have a choice. We can choose a party led by an inveterate liar, which
is happy to appeal to the racist or xenophobic vote, happy to take us
out of the EU with no deal with all the consequences for public
services that entails, happy to see ever longer waiting times for GPs
and A&E, happy to see more homeless people on the streets and
more food banks.*** Instead we can choose a hung parliament with a
Labour minority government that may not even be led by Corbyn, with
their power curtailed by the smaller parties, including the Liberal
Democrats, that can actually do something about the problems we face.
But we can only make that choice by voting tactically.

But I have an
ethical problem with voting tactically

There is one serious
argument against tactical voting. It is the idea that if you have a
choice between voting for a good party, a not so good party and a
terrible party you should always vote for the good party. (The
ranking is what matters here, not my description.) The argument is
that if you vote for the not so good party, you are in some senses
endorsing the bad things that party or its leaders have done in the
past.

That argument
applies to those who prefer to vote Liberal Democrat because of
Labour’s antisemitism problem, or those who think they cannot vote
Liberal Democrat because they were part of the austerity Coalition.
Both arguments are wrong, because they simply do not apply in a FPTP
system when the only two possible winners in the constituency you
live in are the not so good party and the terrible party.

In a FPTP system
your vote for the good party will simply have token value. However
you could have done something towards preventing the terrible party
coming to power, but you chose not to. In that way you become
responsible, in a small way, for what happens when the terrible party
comes to power. By your inaction, you will have contributed to the
terrible party coming to power.

If you vote for the
not so good party, will you be responsible for the not so good things
happening if that party wins? No, because all you could have done
differently is let the terrible party win. There is no way your
voting for the good party will influence anything. It is a wasted
vote because you will have wasted an opportunity to make the world a
better place. The Kantian ‘do no evil’ idea does not apply
because doing no evil actually means allowing more bad things to
happen.

You may say this is
a consequentialist argument, and your philosophy is different. You
might think about the fact that your philosophy would allow tyranny
to come to power, just because you had some problems with the
opposition to tyranny. If you think that is far fetched, you need to
note that part of their manifesto gives the Conservatives a mandate
to change our constitution so that the executive has complete control
over parliament.

There is a weaker
argument for voting for the good party, and that is thinking about
your vote as part of a repeated game. The argument suggests that by
voting for the not so good party, you are encouraging it to remain
not so good. But this fails for the obvious reason that if you do not
do everything you can to stop the terrible party coming to power, you
are encouraging the terrible party.And if all that doesn't convince you, use https://www.swapmyvote.uk/ where you can actually help the party you prefer win something.

But who should I
vote for. It’s so confusing.

For most people its
not. Have a look at this website, for example:
https://tactical.vote/compare orhttps://dontsplittheremainvote.com/. You will see in most cases there is total agreement about who to vote
for tactically. Of course some constituencies are such safe Tory or
Labour seats that your vote is highly unlikely to achieve anything.
But my rough list of constituencies were tactical voting matters
(England and Wales only I’m afraid) is as follows (with the party
to vote for in brackets). It is a long list because I have been
deliberately pessimistic about what the two parties could lose and
optimistic about what they could gain, because there are always
surprises in any General Election.

Why did I bother doing this you might ask. It is just a by-product of some work I did out of my own curiosity looking at marginals, and I thought I might as well share it. I have waited until
now to make these suggestions because I think a lot of confusion has
been caused by sites that have made calls earlier on in the campaign
and then had to revise them. Many a LibDem bar chart has been based
on that misleading information. Fine if the polls don’t move, but
they were always going to move to the two main parties in this
election.

Aberconwy (Lab)

Alyn and Deeside
(Lab)

Ashfield (Labour)

Barrow and Furness
(Labour)

Bassetlaw (Lab)

Bath (LibDem)

Battersea (Labour)

Beaconsfield
(Independent - Dominic Grieve)

Bedford (Lab)

Bermondsey and Old
Southwark (Lab)

Birmingham Edgbaston
(Lab)

Birmingham
Northfields (Lab)

Bishops Auckland
(Lab)

Blackpool North
(Lab)

Blackpool South
(Lab)

Blyth Valley (Lab)

Bolsover (Lab)

Bolton North East
(Lab)

Bolton West (Lab)

Bradford South (Lab)

Brecon and
Radnorshire (LibDem)

Brentford and
Isleworth (Lab)

Bristol North West
(Lab)

Burnley (Lab)

Bury North (Lab)

Bury South (Lab)

Calder Valley (Lab)

Camborne and Redruth
(Lab)

Canterbury (Lab)

Cardiff North (Lab)

Carlisle (Lab)

Carmarthen West and
South (Lab)

Carshalton and
Wallington (LibDem)

Cheadle (LibDem)

Chelsea and Fulham
(LibDem)

Cheltenham (LibDem)

Chingford and Wood
Green (Lab)

Chipping Barnet
(Lab)

City of Chester
(Lab)

Clwyd West (Lab)

Colne Valley (Lab)

Copeland (Lab)

Corby (Lab)

Crawley (Lab)

Crewe and Nantwich
(Lab)

Croydon Central
(Lab)

Dagenham and Rainham
(Lab)

Darlington (Lab)

Delyn (Lab)

Derby North (Lab)

Dewsbury (Lab)

Don Valley (Lab)

Dudley North (Lab)

East Devon
(Independent)

East Worthing and
Shoreham (Lab)

Eastbourne (LibDem)

Eastleigh (LibDem)

Enfield Southgate
(Lab)

Esher and Walton
(LibDem)

Filton and Bradley
Stoke (Lab)

Gedling (Lab)

Gower (Lab)

Great Grimsby (Lab)

Guildford (LibDem)

Halifax (Lab)

Harrow East (Lab)

Hastings and Rye
(Lab)

Hazel Grove (LibDem)

Hendon (Lab)

High Peak (Lab)

Hyndburn (Lab)

Ipswich (Lab)

Keighley (Lab)

Kingston and
Surbiton (LibDem)

Lewes (LibDem)

Lincoln (Lab)

Loughborough (Lab)

Mansfield (Lab)

Middlesbrough South
(Lab)

Milton Keynes North
(Lab)

Milton Keynes South
(Lab)

Montgomeryshire
(LibDem)

Morecambe and
Lunesdale (Lab)

Moreley and Outwood
(Lab)

Newcastle under Lyne
(Lab)

North Cornwall
(LibDem)

North Devon (LibDem)

North East
Derbyshire (Lab)

North Norfolk
(LibDem)

Northampton North
(Lab)

Northampton South
(Lab)

Norwich North (Lab)

Oxford and West
Abingdon (LibDem)

Pendle (Lab)

Penistone and
Stocksbridge (Lab)

Peterborough (Lab)

Plymouth Moor View
(Lab)

Portsmouth South
(Lab)

Preseli
Pembrokeshire (Lab)

Pudsey (Lab)

Putney (Lab)

Reading East (Lab)

Reading West (Lab)

Richmond Park
(LibDem)

Rossendale and
Darwen (Lab)

Rother Valley (Lab)

Rushcliffe (Lab)

Scarborough and
Whitby (Lab)

Scunthorpe (Lab)

Shipley (Lab)

Shrewsbury and
Atcham (Lab)

South Swindon (Lab)

Southampton Itchen
(Lab)Southport (Lab)

St Albans (LibDem)

St Ives (LibDem)

Stevenage (Lab)

Stockton South (Lab)

Stoke-on-Trent North
(Lab)

Stoke-on-Trent South
(Lab)

Stroud (Lab)

Sutton and Cheam
(LibDem)

Telford (Lab)

Thurrock (Lab)

Totnes (LibDem)

Truro and Falmouth
(Lab)

Uxbridge and South
Ruislip (Lab)

Vale of Clwyd (Lab)

Vale of Glamorgan
(Lab)

Wakefield (Lab)

Walsall North (Lab)

Warrington South
(Lab)

Warwick and
Leamington (Lab)

Watford (Lab)

Weaver Vale (Lab)

Wells (LibDem)

Welwyn Hatfield
(Lab)

Westmorland and
Lonsdale (LibDem)

Winchester (LibDem)

Wirral West (Lab)

Wolverhampton North
East (Lab)

Wolverhampton South
West (Lab)

Worcester (Lab)

Workington (Lab)

Wrexham (Lab)

Wycombe (Lab)

York Outer (Lab)

If I have made any
mistakes or bad judgements in this list, do let me know.

There are a few
marginal seats which are so safe that you get a choice. In Arfon, or
Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, you can vote Plaid or Labour without any
fear of letting the Tories win. In Ceredigion the same applies
between Plaid and the LibDems. In Bermondsey and Old Southwark, or
Cambridge, or Leeds North West, or Sheffield Hallam you could vote
for Labour or the LibDems.

Then we have eleven
difficult seats, all in England, where both Labour and the LibDems
have a claim to be the party to vote tactically. It is important to
remember here that over the last months the national polls have been
moving from LibDems to Labour, so polls or recommendations made in
early or even mid November should be treated with caution. However the latest
poll of polls suggest Labour are still below their 2017 total, and
the LibDems are significantly above, with little movement over the
last few days.

One issue I found it hard to assess was the finding in some local polls that Labour voters are more open to tactical voting than Liberal Democrats. I would hope this does not apply to any Liberal Democrat voters who might take any notice of what I say, because if it does they have not been reading my other posts. An argument that should have equal weight is that, if Johnson is not to romp home, the polls need to be a little biased against Labour because they underestimate the youth vote.

Berwick-upon-Tweed
A poll at the end of November had LibDems slightly ahead of
Labour (which makes sense given 2017 result and subsequent national
movement) but the Tories winning easily. More recent B4B MRP poll puts Labour
ahead. TV sites split. So Recommendation Labour

Broxtowe (Lab) Anna
Soubry was the Tory candidate, now running as an Independent with the
Liberals not standing. But this is a Tory/Lab marginal, so
Recommendation Labour

Cities of London and
Westminster TV sites are split. A poll on 23 November had Chuka
Umunna ahead of Labour. However although B4B are suggesting voting
for the LibDems, their polling shows Labour ahead. Jon Worth suggests
LibDems. So close to call. Recommendation Labour but watch out for
any new information. Postscript - new poll has LibDems slightly ahead, so my Recommendation is now LibDem.

Colchester All
the TV sites are recommending Labour, So Recommendation Labour.

Finchley and Golders
Green I think the large Jewish vote here makes this impossible for
Labour, and the TV sites and local polls agree. So Recommendation
LibDem

Kensington Narrowly
won by Labour last time. A poll in mid November had LibDems a bit
ahead of Labour, but the national polls have moved since then. TV
sites split, and B4B are on the fence. Too close to call, so I would
go for sitting MP. Recommendation Labour but watch out for any new
information. Postscript - new local poll has Labour in the lead.

They are Tory
seats where Labour were second, but LibDems had a significant vote as
well. B4B’s MRP puts LibDems in front, and the only positive
recommendations from TV sites are LibDem. Recommendation LibDem

Wimbledon

Polls for
Wimbledon show LibDems ahead, but there has been a movement away from
LibDems towards Labour nationally since then. TV sites split. B4B MRP
poll has LibDems ahead. Recommendation LibDem

Wokingham

Polls for
Wokingham show LibDems ahead, but there has been a movement away from
LibDems towards Labour nationally since then. TV sites that make a
positive call all say LibDem. B4B MRP poll has LibDems ahead.
Recommendation LibDems.

Saturday, 7 December 2019

By othering
I mean treating Corbyn (or more generally the Labour left) as beyond
the pale in terms of conventional politics. Othering implies that
because of his past or current beliefs, associations and actions Corbyn should not be even considered as fit to be an MP, let alone a Prime
Minister. Other politicians can be evaluated in conventional ways,
but this does not apply
to those who are othered. Othering has a number of distinctive, and
potentially useful, features. Let me list two.

First, those who
associate in any way with those othered are themselves regarded as
questionable. I discovered this myself when I joined Labour’s
short-lived Economic Advisory Committee, as I discuss here.
This can be a potent threat. Second, those who are othered can be
discussed in terms that would not normally be used to discuss
politicians. After Johnson compared Corbyn to Stalin, Andrew Neill
asked a Tory MP if he thought Corbyn would have the wealthy shot. “I
do not know”, the MP replied.

Sometimes othering
may be a valid position to take. I still remember the days when the
far right was othered by the mainstream media, rather than being
invited on Newsnight to discuss the latest bit of far right
terrorism. I think that othering was helpful in ostracising racism,
and its absence today is reflected in the rise of hate crime. But no
such justification applies to the leader of the opposition, elected
by hundreds of thousands of people, who is the only alternative to
our current Prime Minister.

For othering to be
justified those being othered have to have some attribute, or have
done some things that are uniquely bad compared to their fellow
citizens. The BNP were racist, and it is quite right that racism is ostracised. If we are talking about politicians, the same has to be
applied to individuals. Is there something these politicians have
done that is uniquely bad compared to other politicians.

Corbyn fails this test. There is nothing Corbyn has done that is uniquely bad compared
to the obvious person to compare him with, his opponent Boris Johnson. Corbyn is not
racist, which is not surprising as he has a lifelong
history of fighting racism. Yet the media, almost without exception,
has done its best to suggest otherwise.

The most obvious
example of othering is the way the media have handled antisemitism
within Labour. Labour has a real problem with antisemitism, but the
media have acted as if Labour are the only party with a racism
problem. In contrast Johnson is not constantly asked why he called
Muslim women letterboxes and bankrobbers, and whether he will
apologise for the increase in hate crime that followed that article.

As a result of this
media othering of Corbyn, there are plenty of voters who say they
cannot vote tactically because of Labour’s antisemitism, seemingly without any
thought that they are therefore keeping in power someone who has
actually made racist statements, and was part of a government that
instituted some of the most discriminatory pieces of legislation of
recent times that goes by the collective term hostile environment.
Any outside observer would conclude that for UK society as a whole,
including its media, Islamophobia is considered acceptable.

When I make these
points some people accuse me of whataboutery, or in trying to
minimise the problem of antisemitism in Labour. Both claims are
false. The whole point about othering someone is that their alleged
behaviour must be unusually bad compared to their comparators, so
othering is all about whataboutery. And of course none of this is
minimising Labour’s very real problem of antisemitism. Yes
antisemitism exists in all parties, but there are reasons (like
support
for the Palestinians) why antisemitism may be worse in the Labour
party, although the evidence is still that this is a problem among a very small proportion of Labour members. But equally there are also
good reasons why Islamophobia and racist views will be relatively
worse in the Tory party.

Then we come to
terrorism. Corbyn is said to be too friendly towards terrorists, and
therefore a unique threat to the UK as Prime Minister. I’m not
going to defend Corbyn’s foreign policy views, some
of which are dubious in my opinion, but are they uniquely bad? To say so
is a hard position to defend when the UK participated with its
closest ally in a pointless war in Iraq which led to hundreds of
thousands of deaths, a war which Corbyn opposed.

In terms of current
threats, we recently had an act of terrorism in Salisbury committed
by Russian agents. You would think, in response, that the
Conservative party would be particularly keen to publish a select
committee report on Russian interference in UK politics. Why Johnson
has decided to delay the report we can only speculate on, but what we
do know about is the links, sometimes financial, between the Tory
party and Russians with close links to the Kremlin. Or maybe it is
because Johnson does not want people to know about the extent of
Russian interference in our elections.

Corbyn shares a left
view of foreign policy which rarely gets much space in the media, but
given the failures of past UK foreign policy and the very dubious
situation of the Conservative party on Russia (again,
just like their Republican counterparts in the US), there is no case
for othering that view or a party leader who proposes it. The idea
that a Corbyn minority government would somehow make the UK a less
safe place is ludicrous when a former Tory Prime Minister is
advocating
people vote for just such an outcome.

Of course there is
every reason for the Tory press to try and other Corbyn. Once you
regard him as a perfectly normal and respectable politician, the
arguments against voting for him are slim indeed. The Tory record on
the economy is terrible. All they have to trumpet is employment
growth, but that just reflects an appallingly (and unprecedentedly)
bad record on productivity, and therefore living standards for
workers. Labour’s policies for the next five years are mostly
popular with the public, and even though it will cost a lot of money
the cost is much less than the Brexit that will happen if Johnson
sticks to his commitments.

On an individual
level Corbyn seems far more preferable to Johnson as a Prime
Minister, for the simple reason that Corbyn clearly cares about other
people whereas Johnson cares only for himself. Corbyn shows real
empathy
for others, which we saw clearly after the Grenfell fire, whereas
Johnson has the attitudes typical of the worst of his class. The way
of hiding all that from people is to other Corbyn and his party,
which virtually the entire mainstream media has done.

I understand why our
current government and their supporters in the press would do that,
and I have respect for those MPs (past and present) who have got out
of that boat. I find it much more difficult to respect some of those
in the centre, who normally pride themselves in taking a balanced and
reasoned view, that are prepared to see the most right wing UK
government in living memory continue to destroy the economy through
Brexit, continue to cause misery for many decent people and threaten
our constitution by proposing to give the executive complete control
over parliament.

The othering of
Corbyn will probably win the election for Johnson. But we should
never give up hope, so please vote tactically on Thursday to keep
Johnson out and allow a second referendum on Brexit.